periaqueductal gray

One you're actually already familiar with if you've listened to previous episodes of this show, and if you haven't, we've kindly supplied links in the show notes, and not just to drive our own download numbers up.

So is the, the area of the brain where you're seeing consciousness arise, is this similar to the area that is the, uh, periaqueductal gray?

It's right next to the periaqueductal gray, and that's important.

So the area I was talking about is the reticular activating system, which is the system that activates, arouses, modulates cortical processes.

But it's right next to and intimately interconnected with the periaqueductal gray.

Uh, why that's important is the periaqueductal gray is the sort of assembly point for all of those homeostatic mechanisms that I mentioned earlier.

It is a very significant fact that all residual error signals from all of our bodily homeostats are transmitted to the periaqueductal gray.

Uh, I think that the periaqueductal gray's task is to prioritize among these different error signals as to which is the most salient, uh, at this point in time because there's an action bottleneck.